There is a spectre haunting western society. “Materialism,” this book suggests, “is making millions of us feel joyless, anxious and, even worse, depressed.” By “materialism” the writer does not mean the philosophical doctrine according to which all phenomena can be explained by reference to the interaction of tiny bits of matter – though personally I find that idea does make me feel joyless and anxious. No, our author is using “materialism” in the more common sense of “wanting stuff”. And stuff, so it seems, is bad for us.

We are apparently in the grip of “one of the most pressing problems of the 21st century” – that “one of” providing a handy get-out clause lest anyone object that war, global warming or disease are slightly more pressing. The problem in question is an “anxiety” christened “stuffocation” – a feeling of being oppressed by one’s ungovernable heap of belongings.

The hunger to renounce or at least downgrade the importance of material things is hardly exclusive to modernity. Nor is a diagnosis of our society as obsessed with acquisition very original – James Wallman cites on the subject, among other things, Oliver James’s Affluenza and the genre of reality TV shows about hoarders. Yet he also perceives a new flowering of resistance to the siren lure of physical commodities.

What, then, might one do instead of heaping up things? Some people adopt “minimalism”, and boast about how few objects they possess – as few as 43, allegedly. While Wallman uncritically relays some anecdotes suggesting, improbably, that such paring-down can cure disorders such as multiple sclerosis, he doesn’t approve of minimalism – because: “Stuff, simply put, is good.” A bit of stuff can be a useful tool, or a means of sexual signalling, or a vehicle for social connection. Why restrict such possibilities?

Next Wallman considers “simple living” – the dream of moving to a mountainside cabin and farming your own goats, or whatever such people do. Again he has a perky retort: simple living, he observes, is actually “quite complicated” if you have to learn to grow your food, survive harsh weather conditions, and so on. A third way to resist “stuffocation” is what Wallman calls the “medium chill” – a simple “no thanks” to prospects of, say, promotion to a job that offers more money but less time to lounge around reading with the family. His objection to this is that it does not “feel aspirational” – though that surely depends on what one aspires to in life.

The best answer, in Wallman’s opinion, is “experientialism” – focusing on having nice experiences instead of on acquiring more stuff. Psychologists these days argue, he notes approvingly, that “experiences are more likely to lead to happiness” – though he doesn’t discuss what happiness is, exactly, or whether you should set it as a goal in this way.

Thorstein Veblen is mentioned only two-thirds of the way through this book, though in his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class, published more than a century ago, he summed up much of Wallman’s subject perfectly in his immortal phrase “conspicuous consumption”. Now Wallman uses him to point out a challenge to the “experientalist” lifestyle, which is that, with the advent of Facebook, we are able to conspicuously consume experiences as well as physical goods, leading to the phenomenon of fomo (“fear of missing out”), and the feeling that all your friends are doing more glamorous and exciting things every weekend than you are.

Even so, Wallman argues, “experiences are more likely to make us happy because we are less likely to get bored of them, more likely to see them with rose-tinted glasses, more likely to think of them as part of who we are, and because they are more likely to bring us closer to other people and are harder to compare”. Curiously, it seems that if we agree to celebrate the “rose-tinted glasses” effect of remembered experience, whereby we subconsciously edit out what was boring or unpleasant about that glamping trip, we must approve of fooling ourselves.

It perhaps bears pointing out, too, that some stuff is better than some experiences. An “experientialist” who feasts on digital images of child abuse is not thereby to be more respected than the hoarder of old copies of the Racing Post or the serial purchaser of wristwatches. Indeed the privileging of expensive, boutique “experience” over the acquisition of objects was, arguably, already part of the satirical target of the torture-porn movie Hostel.

Tellingly, a lot of Wallman’s case studies involve already-wealthy people who can delegate the running of their businesses while they focus on goofing off (he suggests that we think of them as “hippies with calculators”), or the kind of overgrown Silicon Valley children who boast of blowing $1,700 on “a great new kite”. In this way, the reader is reassured that the “experientalist movement” does not threaten the engine of capitalist growth. We can still buy stuff: it just ought to be more “experiental products” such as “musical instruments, computer games, tennis rackets and books” – or, of course, as Japanese aesthetes have long suggested, an exquisite tea set.

But the line between experiental and non-experiental products is very hard to draw. Does a non-enlightened modern consumer not have a pleasant experience every time she walks into a room in her new Louboutins? Is my own life not enhanced by my unnecessarily expansive collection of mechanical pencils? And is it, conversely, not quite common to buy an experience – an adventuresome holiday or restaurant blowout – and have a more thoroughly disappointing time than if one had, after all, decided instead to buy a nice vase? Indeed, does the commodification of experience in the fast-growing “experience economy” not prompt us to wonder about a possible difference between experiences one buys and experiences one doesn’t have to?

Such questions are, perhaps, too difficult to fit readily in this book’s amiably encouraging scheme. Wallman’s argument that the rich west is drowning in unnecessary objects is at least surely right. And the author’s own day-job, it turns out, is also an example of the return of the immaterial: he is a “cultural forecaster”, which sounds to my ear more respectable than “futurist” or “hedge-fund manager” but perhaps a bit less so than “analyst” or “consultant”, though there is obviously an overlap. What, I ended up wondering, does it say about our culture that so many people find lucrative work within it that essentially consists of trying to predict the future? That, I suppose, is material for another book entirely.